without recommends

There are 3 types of “pull” dependencies of a package in the apt system: “depends”, “recommends” and “suggests” (I am ignoring for the purposes of this post the other three “push dependencies”: “conflicts”, “replaces” and “provides”).

The rule is: everyone needs “depends”, most need “recommends” and only some need “suggests”. Ubuntu by default installs “depends” and “recommends” and ignores “suggests”. However, from my experience, I don’t need “recommends” and they bloat my system (especially if I just want to try out a package for usefulness or to reproduce a bug).

You can tell aptitude each time to ignore “recommends” by adding the -R parameter. The way to permanently add this option is to edit /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01ubuntu like this: